Posted
by
Soulskill
on Sunday September 28, 2008 @10:41AM
from the rabbit-neutality-is-all-you,-though dept.

RATLSNAKE writes "The heads of some of the most popular Australian ISPs were all interviewed over at ZDNet about Net Neutrality. For once, they all seem to agree, and they say it's a problem with the US business model, or the lack thereof. They discuss why they don't think it's an issue in Australia. Simon Hackett, the managing director of Adelaide-based ISP Internode, had this to say: 'The [Net neutrality] problem isn't about running out of capacity. It's a business model that's about to explode due to stress. ... The idea that the entire population can subsidize a minority with an extremely high download quantity actually isn't necessarily the only way to live.' Of course, this also explains why we Australians do not have truly unlimited plans."

It's not like I can say "doctors are too expensive, I think I'll just decide to never get sick".

That can probably be said for retirement and welfare as well. Sure, there are scammers, but a single mother staying home with her baby rather than paying a 12 year old $5 an hour to sit while she works a checkout at walmart is a good investment in my eyes.

Also, everyone will have to retire at some point, you just have to live long enough. A society can be judged by how they take care of their elderly and their children.

Almost. Most providers here have a FUP (Fair User Policy). So you have an unlimited plan, but if you belong to the top whatever-percentile and/or there is congestion somewhere on the network, you may get a letter/email asking you to watch and reduce your bandwidth-usuage. In practice, this means you have to be moving serious amounts of bandwidth though, e.g. Terabytes per month.

and my cap is supposedly 20gig of transfer (up/down no longer matters. yay!). I've gone over a couple of times, but no one's ever bothered me. These are pretty soft caps, and only once has an ISP attempted to charge extra for the bandwidth, when my roommate left a torrent running full upload for 10 days straight.

Please. My quick search shows that the *vast* majority of Canadian ISPs have unlimited bandwidth. Most that do have bandwidth caps set it at a reasonably generous 200GB.See: http://www.canadianisp.ca/cgi-bin/ispsearch.cgi [canadianisp.ca]

I have Teksavvy.com, which is $40/month (in Ontario, at least) for unlimited bandwidth.

It's only if you have the misfortune of subscribing to the services of a monopoly like Rogers or Bell that you'd be scraping the bottom of the ISP barrel. These companies profit by marketing to the ignorant masses, and peddling the lowest common denominator. The quality of their service is irrelevant, so long as it meets the basic expectations of a statistically significant segment of the masses.

Contrast this with the plethora of competitive ISPs in Canada who must compete on quality of service.

That's not to say that your area has much choice in ISP. However, if it's anywhere halfway urban, there ought to be at least one non-monopoly choice.

My Canadian ISP (MTS Allstream) gives unlimited plans. I download all kinds of stuff, and lots of it, and I've NEVER ONCE gotten an email or anything saying I've approached any kind of limit. I used to host my own website as well as FTP & SSH, no port blocking (other than 25), no complaints about that.

We used to have Shaw a number of years ago, and no issues with them either. I do, however, know some people who have received email saying "You've exceeded 100gb* transfer this month" (not sure on the exac

Are you saying that if someone builds a maintenance-heavy canal from a perpetually filling freshwater lake, and charge people a fixed fee to draw "unlimited" water from it, then there would be a problem if a few select individuals decided to build fifteen bakeries and twenty-seven car washes next to it?

I'd even go as far as saying that downloading continuously at max capacity is somewhat immoral in itself, so long as you know that you are using far more than everyone else _and_ that it causes congestion pro

I'd even go as far as saying that downloading continuously at max capacity is somewhat immoral in itself, so long as you know that you are using far more than everyone else _and_ that it causes congestion problems. You are like the person founding a car wash next to the canal and saying that the contract stated unlimited access.

Some of us are paying for 3Mbps down/ 384kbps up, I see nothing immoral about actually using it. If the business did not anticipate that people would use what they pay a a premium on, then the business needs to change. We're not here to second guess them, if they offer a service, expect us to use it. They absolutely have, and always have had, the ability to regulate our bandwidth to the contracted rate. You won't get a penny more than you pay for.

It's very easy to caclulate the total "bytes" needed to accomodate this, although it's misleading to do so. Unlike your reservoir model, the actual limitation is the flow rate through the pipe, not the "available bytes". At certain times of the day the flow rate might be maxed out and they start dropping packets. More importantly they already have the models to know what they need to do to meet their capacity demands. No one can drain the reservoir, unless someone is selling a product he can't deliver on. Who wants to start that class action suit? Count me in.

The real issue is the networks are horribly out of date, since there has never really been a push to give customers better service, only service to more customers. The question they want to get answered is "who is going to fund upgrades?" because in a monopoly, you don't take the cost of upgrades out of your net profits, you make customers pay. On this I can't blame them, why should they suffer just to deliver a product that won't deliver a single extra dollar?

No, karma doesn't count, that they've been robbing us for half a century has been long forgotten, at least by them.

At least partly, they don't get it. They are right that it's a business model that we use. It's called "You get what you pay for." As long as that is the case, AND you realize what it is you are actually paying for, then how exactly is this business model about to 'explode'? In a free market competition defines the minimum quality of the products. The broadband companies need to be more clear I guess. When I sign the contract for broadband I am not getting 100% of my theoretical maximum bandwidth or m

It's simple: You pay for 'unlimited' usage, and that means you get usage that is as unlimited as the resource permits.

And since that isn't really unlimited, there's a bit of a problem. You're paying for one thing, and they're providing something else. That's usually called "fraud" or "false advertising", and it tends to annoy people who want to actually know (and get) what they're paying for. That they probably put something like "unlimited doesn't mean what you think it does" in the fine print only matters from a legal "see, you can't sue us, nyah nyah" perspective, not a "this isn't what I paid for, you bastards" perspective.

People should not confuse 'unlimited' with 'infinite'. Everything humans do is finite.

According to the context you agree with when you get the broadband account your account really is 'unlimited'. In the context of broadband it only means that the company is not going to single you out and limit what you can do. That's all it means. There is legal precedence to use this word in this context. It's not fraud of false advertising.

The problem I think is one of defining the value of information. How does o

The same thing here in Canada, and when compared with Japan and Europe, the U.S. as well.

The problem with that argument is that people are not distributed uniformly. The ISP's have no excuse for not providing good service in Sidney, Melbourne, Toronto, Boston, etc. They all have much higher population densities than the European or Japanese "countryside."

What a bunch of self-serving assholes. They're no better than Comcastoff.

This is a problem for any nation that wants its citizens to have more than basic email and Web browsing, and doesn't want said citizens to have their services curtailed at the whim of anticompetitive monsters. Apparently, the U.S. doesn't have a monopoly on those, either.

At some point, more and more nations are going to have to put connectivity in the same class of

I'm getting seriously fed up of this. You are not paying even in the same ballpark of the actual cost of supplying your full connection's worth of bandwidth for an entire month. If you want to use that much bandwidth, buy a leased line. If you don't like that you get more kb/s than you can use all the time, move back to a 56kb/s modem.

Why on earth the US ISPs have tried telling you that you can just use as much bandwidth as you want, for so long, I'll never understand. Comcast's model of "this much, then we write to you, then we cut you off if you do it again" is absurd, doubly so given they don't provide any easy metering, but that doesn't change the reality of what you're paying for vs what you wish your money covered.

So, they're overcharging the average person to balance the extreme? My point is that bandwidth is about the most expensive thing in providing the connection, and personally I think having the cost of Internet access more closely resemble the cost of providing it is a good thing...

I'm sure the telcos prefer to give 'all you can eat' to everyone, and live with the fact that there is a percentage of people that will actually use their bandwidth 24x7, than charge a proportional amount.

At least in Spain, they charge a minimum (I think it's around 20 euros per month now) just for access, even if you don't use the service at all. And when you have 10 million lines, that's a lot of money. If they decide to switch to a p

I'm getting seriously fed up of this. You are not paying even in the same ballpark of the actual cost of supplying your full connection's worth of bandwidth for an entire month.

This is a common misconception. Bandwidth is actually very, very cheap; if you use your full connection's worth of bandwidth, it costs only a tiny bit more than if you let it sit idle. In order to provide more bandwidth, you need two things: routers and fibers. Routers are cheap. In fact, thanks to Moore's Law, the price per unit bandwidth for a router falls exponentially over time. On the other hand, running new fiber is expensive, because it involves digging, which is both expensive in itself and requires expensive planning (to make sure you don't damage someone else's infrastructure) and bureaucracy (for the same reason). Fortunately, when you install fiber, you can install as much as you want for little extra cost. The problem that the US cable companies are experiencing is that they need to run new fiber to a lot of places, but they would rather put it off as long as possible. But this is a strictly one-time expense; once they've run the fibers, adding more bandwidth just means buying more cheap routers.

While every fact you list as supporting evidence is true, your conclusion is simply irrelevant for most providers.

Regardless of the actual potential cost of bandwidth, companies are still leasing lines form other companies to make interconnections. Unless we're discussing backbone providers (who still have to make deals with other providers for interconnection), they're having to buy their bandwidth. That's expensive, no matter the hardware cost per bit.

I think the whole entire "Net Neutrality" argument is a scam. IMO it's about two things primarily:

First, I think it's about making a whole lot of money for, and giving corporate welfare/protectionism to large communications companies that have had plenty of the subsidies from the govt and taxpayers in the past - technology is making things they used to charge an arm and a leg for free, or practically free - look at VOIP for one - and every year the web and our networked society seems to progress more.

Second though, and more importantly, I think it is about control and censorship. The government and these large media conglomerates don't like that people can get any sort of unfiltered information they'd like from around the world in real time. They don't like the fact that people can get news up to the minute from anywhere on any subject that they are interested in that is likely less biased, more accurate, and less full of "agenda setting talking point spin" than they can from TV News* (which has really become absurd, it's Paris/Britney mixed with a health dose of paranoia-behavior-control). They don't like it that instead of having some fascist douche like Bill O'Reilly telling people "what the news means to them," people can either look it up on their own or find their own place full of smart people with diverse views to have conversations with (Slashdot being a perfect example).. They don't like how the net can be used as a tool for orgaqnization and mass communication by practically anybody.

When one of your main goals is control, and knowledge and information are pwoer - the internet is your enemy.

*Now everything I have stated as populist advantages to a free internet can also have their downsides, for example - not all news online is accurate, honest, agenda free - but compared to what you see on TV it is, especially if you are even halfway savvy consumer of media you can find it easily. Also, anything that can be used to spread information can also be used to disinform - but I don't think anything comes close to the amount of disinformation/one-sided information and societal control as network television does.

So these are the real drivers of anti-net neutrality: Money and control. All of this stuff about not having enough capacity, and how strained the internet is - those issues can be solved so many ways properly without creating a digital ghetto for non-corporate/big money websites.

Recent events indicate that net neutrality isn't the only "problem with the US business model, or the lack thereof". It seems that big business wants the profits privatized (as they should be) but any losses should be socialized.

There is plenty of blame to go around but the majority of the blame rests on the shoulders of big business. By the way, for the companies not incorporated in the US, there are some of the same problems. They are not quite as extreme as in the US but people not living in the US shouldn't feel smug, it could happen to you if you are not vigilant.

I love Australia and New Zealand, but a consequence of pervasively metered internet service means that you must check what an AU/NZ hotel means by "internet access". As one of the bandwidth hogs who (for example) downloads podcasts and uploads pictures, I found that it was startlingly easy to hit some limits. Further, the limits can bite you.

When checking a hotel in a country like AU or NZ, be sure and ask:

Is there an upper limit on how much I can download/upload without an additional fee? Some AU/NZ

... is all about how the various bits of the Internet are privately owned and unregulated. Today, we can use our broadband connections to access any sites we want. But this is based completely on the charity of the owners of those pieces. At any time, they reserve the right to knock any and all traffic off 'their' networks to accomodate their own product.

Meanwhile, in most of the rest of the world, the network operators contract with their customers to provide bandwidth as a service separate from any conte

Until someone finds a technical solution that truly allows everyone to have 'unlimited' internet, you have to find some way to ration it.

I'd rather be charged for what I use and not have to worry about ISPs sticking their noses into my data stream and killing traffic they don't like.

Here in oz, I'm on a $A60 plan that gets me 40G/month @ 20 megabits/sec. I don't find that restrictive, I'm not constantly worrying about how much bandwidth I use (as some of the hysterical postings above imply) and I'm not paying for the wankers who download 400G/month of movies they never find time to watch.

I'm an Aussie and I love my ISP, iinet. (This is not a paid post, I'm simply giving credit where it's due).

They provide great customer service, their ADSL2 is always fast (unless I go over my monthly 45gb cap), they provide media services like I can watch EPL games streamed from their servers......and the best part is they tell companies like MediaSentry who demand personal information about users for alleged infringement to fuck off and get a warrant.

whenever conservatives talk about socialized services they seem to conflate problems of government corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, and unpopular government with the socialized institution. but you're forgetting that public schools, law enforcement, fire departments, public libraries, roads, post offices, etc. are all socialized public infrastructure. if you really think that having government run infrastructure (in other words, having a government) is a bad idea, then wouldn't it be worse having them run the military, police, and writing laws?

if a country is a true democracy, then its government is merely a mechanism for carrying out the will of the people. i mean, most people like the idea of having free schools, but a single person cannot establish a free education system, so you do it through the government. likewise with roads, libraries, the legal system, etc.

if the government isn't acting in public interest, then that's a whole other fundamental problem that needs to be addressed regardless of whether ISPs should be socialized. i mean, why would a government ISP ignore problems any more than a commercial ISP would? would the gestapo come out and silence anyone who complains? or would they just ignore customer complaints like commercial ISPs do? at least the public has a voice in government, whereas they don't have a voice in private corporations.

all the people i've spoken to who've used public wi-fi access have commented on how great it is and seem quite satisfied with the way it works. there's no reason to think that just because a service isn't run based on corporate profits that it would be inherently inferior.

While the sluggish inefficiency of bureaucracy is a problem in terms of quality of service, it's even more of a problem in terms of cost.

Unless you tax the citizenry to heinous proportions, there is only a limited government budget to deal with. That budget should be allocated effectively into programs that, for whatever reason, cannot be provided effectively as anything but a government service. For the most part, this means programs that inherently must run net operating losses in order for the service

You don't think there is corruption and bureaucratic inefficiency in "public schools, law enforcement, fire departments, public libraries, roads, post offices, etc."? We have learned through sad experience that it is the nature and disposition of almost all men, when they get a little power, to exercise that power corruptly. I live in a small town where everyone knows everyone else and there is corruption even here.

Have we not learned our lesson from communism? The more power and control of people's lives G

i completely agree with you. the way i see it, the larger a government gets (in terms of the size of the population it governs) the less democratic it becomes, not only due to bureaucratic inefficiencies which are incurred as an organization increases in size, but also because of the logistical problems presented by trying to satisfy such a large population.

there's a huge political spectrum covering the vast American cultural landscape. that diversity is one of our strengths. however, being part of one large nation creates a single political hegemon which rules over this diverse cultural landscape. it's impossible to homogenize such a vast population spread over such a large geographical area, and even if it were possible, it wouldn't necessarily be a good thing.

i think it would be preferable to adopt the European model, whereby "states" are actually states, but their political autonomy and cultural diversity do not prevent them from working together to achieve common interests through the European Union. you could still have federal-level initiatives, for things like FEMA, but they would be run as international agencies similar to UNICEF or the IPCC.

whenever conservatives talk about socialized services they seem to conflate problems of government corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency, and unpopular government with the socialized institution. but you're forgetting that public schools, law enforcement, fire departments, public libraries, roads, post offices, etc. are all socialized public infrastructure.

Good grief, you are using those as examples of socialism working? Lots of people have problems with police departments all over the place, and listing s

Having attended both private and public schools, and driven on private roads, and also in areas with privately-run fire departments and security, as a user of FedEx, and video rental stores, project Gutenberg, university libraries (and having read books which were researched with LexisNexis)..

Yeah, I can honestly say that the government-run versions of these have all been inferior.

The United States is NOT a true democracy, we are a republic. The will of the people is not always the correct action, no matter how many scream for it. It may seem a bit pedantic, but it is a very important distinction.

well, i recently spoke to my boss about it. he's not really a power user, though since i began working at the company a few years ago he's become a lot more interested in technology, possibly because i've helped him integrate it into his business. anyways, we started talking about municipal/public wi-fi access, and since he does a lot of traveling he's had a lot of experience with public wi-fi access in different cities. i was surprised at how many cities he mentioned had free public wi-fi access. i can't r

I am with Optus, I get full ADSL2+ speeds and 20/40GB (20 peak, 40 off peak, and yes, peak is 12 noon to 12 midnight, off peak is the reverse).

I download enough to satisfy my needs, and the price is quite fair ($70 p/m).

I've only ever gone over my cap once, and that was to rebuild a Linux server for a mate.

I'd rather have a realistic cap than have some fucktard diddling with my packets.

As for "every Australian" you've ever talked to... what, is that a grand total of 5? I am a self confessed geek with lots of geek friends, we all love our ISPs because we're not idiots. We don't go for price, we go for quality and download capacity. I can only think of maybe 5 or 6 people I know that hate their ISP, and they aren't geeks - family members who didn't consult the family geek before getting their plan.

Net "neutrality" (I am still bewildered about how that term is valid) seems like a big excuse for ISPs in the US to punish their customers. I think the main downfall of the US is not having body like the TIO (http://www.tio.com.au/) to deal with ISPs fucking you over. I've had bad ISPs in the past that have tried to screw me, what do I do? Contact the TIO and have them fight my case for me. I don't go to court, I don't really need to do much other than contact them, give them details, and they do the investigations. They pull server logs, demand details of the case, and basically make the ISP think twice before dicking their customers. They don't enforce the laws, or even make them up, they are purely there to mediate cases. They have a "fee" structure that makes it hard for ISPs to see a net gain from screwing customers.

Case in point:

An ISP wasn't delivering advertised speeds for my connection, I said I wanted out due to false advertising. They returned saying I needed to pay AU$550 to release from the contract. Well, I wasn't going to take this laying down, so I went to the TIO. They investigated the case and ended up ruling in my favour. While they weren't fined (this is something for Fair Trading or Consumer Affairs, depending on the state), they were liable for AU$1500 in fees due to not responding at the first and second level of investigation. I ended up paying nothing, they ended up $2050 in the hole for being dickheads about it.

I digress, if you want to hear about people bitching about ISPs, talk to a Kiwi... or an American...

Net "neutrality" (I am still bewildered about how that term is valid) seems like a big excuse for ISPs in the US to punish their customers.

It's a big excuse for ISPs in the US who chose not to re-invest in their ifrastructure with the billions of tax break dollars they received in the past decade.

In particular, cable companies here have done nothing to improve their core. They kept ramping up the claimed speeds in the last mile, but never bothered to fix their core networking so it could handle all those leaf nodes at full speed. Pretty much every cable company in the US requires transit from some other ISP before they hit major backbones, and they pay dearly for that.

But, the ISPs that did any forward thinking and build out are not punishing their customers with total byte caps or speeds reduced from maximum.

It gets worse than that - ISPs who are stuck with crappy networks can't offer the kinds of services that eat up bandwidth but which can make them lots of money. Things like on-demand TV, movie downloads etc.

No, he didn't sue anyone, he complained to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman. Under the Telecommunications Act providers have an obligation to provide set levels of service, with potentially huge fines if they are in breach of the Act. In some cases the ISP has to pay the fines (thousands of $ / day) to the customer. If you let your ISP know you will contact the TIO if they don't fix something it's usually fixed within 3 days.

I play WoW with a couple of Aussies, and the easiest way to get them fired up is to complain about your internet. You'll start hearing about their month 10gb caps for 50 bucks. The reason it's an American problem and not an Australian problem is simply because the internet is almost as limited in Australia as it used to be here when everyone had 56k and was on AOL.

Two reason for this one being their cheap bastard or their choice of internet wasn't their decision

It was forced on them cause their parents/room-mate. whom makes the decision choose an ISP because the ad was on TV alot or Telephone provider with a monpoly that offers bundled Voice/Data + Mobile on a single bill.

Most likely these people are on a lower income to afford good ISP plan or under-contract, out of contract and CBF churning to another ISP.

We have similar net connections in NZ and I don't see the problem. It is never a case of not being able to get what you want, it is a case of having to pay for it. Sure if you want to pay $30 a month you will get 10GB a month, but for myself I get 100GB a month at ADSL2+ unthrottled speeds (although only this speed within the country reliably) for around $80 a month.

I pay a premium because I use the service more. It costs them to provide bandwidth, which I should be paying for if I am using it. Also

>>>We have similar net connections in NZ and I don't see the problem. It is never a case of not being able to get what you want, it is a case of having to pay for it.>>>

Precisely. I wouldn't mind paying $50 a month with a 100 gigabyte cap. I'd just download smaller files (70 megabyte tv shows) instead of the larger stuff. And if I hit my cap such that my access was cut-off for the rest of the month, I'd just use my backup 50k dialup account until October 1st came back around.

My fellow Americans do tend to make a big deal about small things, but I think that's a flaw with this entire "entitlement generation". I've heard a lot of university professors complain that young adults walk into a college classroom and expect to get an A just because they showed-up, and then they get yell at the prof, because he gave them a B. Likewise they expect to be able to download 1000 gigs while only paying $50 a month.

The world just doesn't work that way. You don't get something for nothing; you have to do the work and/or pay the cost.

Jeez.

I'm only 35 years old, and already I sound like my grandpa.;-) Well at least I didn't have to walk to school in a snowstorm.

If you communicate within your ISP network, it would be the least cost, preferably 0 cost per packet.If you communicate within the local network (peering ISP's, geographically local), it would be a low cost but non-zero.If you communicate over large distances in which high utilization lines are used (undersea, satellite..) you have a high cost per packet.

One is only charged for sending, NOT receiving. This is usable using ONLY QoS already built in TCP/IP and could be set up per program or even p

The problem is that this idea undermines one of the main points of net neutrality, to make as many parts of the Internet as free and easily accessible as others.

I agree that P2P is holding us back, and unfortunatley current P2P systems aren't "smart" enough to prefer local connections over long distance ones (which might actually be a trivial fix, but I don't know enough about the inner workings of Bittorrent and others.

Plus, it kind of fits with one of the main truths of the Internet's capacity; demand will always meet or exceed availablity.

I agree that P2P is holding us back, and unfortunately current P2P systems aren't "smart" enough to prefer local connections over long distance ones (which might actually be a trivial fix, but I don't know enough about the inner workings of Bittorrent and others

Ah, but they already are, to a large extent, based on three principals:

1. (Almost) All P2P systems will prefer high bandwidth and/or low-latency peers. These tend to be the ones that are local.

2. I've seen plugins/mods to several popular clients including eMule and Vuze that do a version of this by IP address look up.

The real problem is that ISPs don't encourage this, for example, by never throttling local connections and/or excluding that bandwidth from any caps.I don't want to start getting charged different rates per country, but might not be so offended by a bandwidth cap if it excluded local peers; particularly if the ISP actively facilitated taking advantage of this feature.

(Almost) All P2P systems will prefer high bandwidth and/or low-latency peers. These tend to be the ones that are local.

I am a heavy Bittorrent user in Seattle, USA, and I think you're wrong. I have noticed that the fastest and most reliable peers/seeds tend to be European or Asian, even when I'm downloading American TV shows or the Presidential debates.

Possibly because their residential connections aren't limited to 128kbps upload.

To add to OP, with Bigpond's "download limits", if you exceed your cap, you get charged 0.15c per extra megabyte downloaded, which works out to be $150 per a gigabyte see here [bigpond.com], in comparison to Westnet for example, another Australian ISP which charges $6/GB (see: here [westnet.com.au].

I'm not sure how it works in other countries, but for most ISP's other than Bigpond, a scheme called "shaping" is in place for nearly all plans, so that when you exceed your download limit, your internet speed gets slowed to 64kbps for the

>>>The problem is that this idea undermines one of the main points of net neutrality, to make as many parts of the Internet as free and easily accessible as others

I disagree. My understanding of "net neutrality" is that all packets will be treated identically, regardless of where they came from, or where they are going. It has nothing to do with providing cheap service. It's about not censoring access (such as Comcast giving nbc.com packets low priority).

I disagree. My understanding of "net neutrality" is that all packets will be treated identically, regardless of where they came from, or where they are going. It has nothing to do with providing cheap service. It's about not censoring access (such as Comcast giving nbc.com packets low priority).

I know what you mean, there's many different definitions of NN. Yours is essentially the same as mine, if a bit more specific (which is good). When I say free, I meant more free as in speech; it'd be kind of silly to make ISPs non-profit organizations.

It's just the gatekeepers. The ISPs become gatekeepers to the Internet. If you don't deal with the ISPs directly, then it's your local Internet Cafe or Library etc; that become gatekeepers. My point is, NN should be about limiting the number of gatekeeper

Well I disagree about limiting the gatekeepers. Imagine if every home had 10 different ISPs he could choose from. It would mean "buying" an ISP is like buying a TV - it's just a commodity, and the only real difference is price. You'd have true competition.

Disclaimer: I'm on what is considered a very good plan for Australia. Optus Cable, 20GB peak/40GB off-peak (off-peak is 12 midnight to 12 noon), 10Mbps down/256kbps up (though in practice it's really about 7Mbps down). After all my peak usage is used I get shaped to 64kbps down/up (and my extra off-peak becomes unavailable). If I use up all my off-peak it starts taking from my peak usage. No free sites - all traffic counts towards my usage no matter the source. I pay about AU$70/month for this service (which BTW is very reliable - my only real issue with it is the pitiful upload speed). It's a grandfathered plan - you can't get it anymore but I'm allowed to stay on it - the new plans are much less friendly (value for money for net access has been trending downwards in Australia over the last few years).

I find your definition of "application" strange - I would have thought "application" would refer to type of traffic, rather than source.

I want ISPs to prioritise traffic based on type, just I do at my end. I use cFosSpeed [www.cfos.de] to prioritise real-time applications (VOIP) highest, things requiring low latency (e.g. web browsing) next, and things which aren't particularly time-dependent lowest (e.g. downloads, P2P).

Most of the time, P2P runs at full speed, because there's nothing else going on. But as soon as something else starts using the net, P2P slows down - and then quickly speeds up again as soon as the higher-priority activity stops.

I'd love ISPs to do the same thing, so my VOIP calls were at the highest priority end-to-end. ISPs should never prevent any type of traffic, but I'm very happy for them to reduce the performance of applications that are not significantly time-dependent so that significantly time-dependent traffic is preferred. I'll still get my downloads - it'll just take a little longer.

I'd also be in favour of per-megabyte charging, so long as it's at a reasonable rate (not $150/GB as Telstra charges for excess usage!), and that you can set a cap after which you get shaped to low speeds, at which point you have to go to a secure web site and set a new cap for that month only (or something along those lines).

That seems logical, but given how companies like Comcast act, they'd decide that the NBC.com "type" or the CWTV.com "type" should be given low-priority simply because it competes with Comcast's own television sales. It is better, I think, to simply tell ISP's to ignore the content. Be neutral.

Rather than have the ISP control traffic, let the sender adjust dynamically to congestion. For example CWTV.com's video player is constantly fluctuating from 128k to 500kbit/s based upon changing conditions. (BTW Voice-over-Internet is hardly a demanding application. I don't about your country, but in the U.S. telephones are only 56k wide. That's all you really need for voice-quality connections over VoIP.)

And finally, ISPs need to stop being lazy. They should be constantly upgrading the network & adding more bandwidth. I get the impression ISPs want to just sit on their butts & "freeze" capacities at current levels rather than add more. So they are trying to limit usage, rather than expand.

If you communicate within your ISP network, it would be the least cost, preferably 0 cost per packet.If you communicate within the local network (peering ISP's, geographically local), it would be a low cost but non-zero.If you communicate over large distances in which high utilization lines are used (undersea, satellite..) you have a high cost per packet.

ISP: What a wonderful idea! Let's get our Cisco rep on the line and see if we can get our gear reconfigured to ship every packet to Europe and back!

If you communicate within your ISP network, it would be the least cost, preferably 0 cost per packet.

That might be true on a telco network using DSL for the last mile but I don't think it holds true on a cable network using DOCSIS. If I'm sucking down 5Mbits that's still 13.1% of the available downstream (5/38) on a DOSCIS 2.0 network regardless of where it's coming from.

I rather like the current model, but for another reason: Americans are already so isolated, so unconscious of the existence of other countries or other parts of the world, that the current model in a sense subsidises not just browsing, but education. Getting more people on the 'net is important, but a tiered structure opens the door to things like "US-only" plans, which is exactly what the head-up-their-ass America-is-the-world Republican redneck hicks would buy. That makes the Internet far less valuable

But the point is that net neutrality is indeed an American issue. It was not the first time that an issue was raised and turned down by the lobby but net neutrality is very proactive. It is like an open source preference and Microsoft starts to lobby against it and then you complain that you don't get it. It gets stronger as the lobby fights against it.

Net neutrality is the dominant pratice worldwide. Do we need to codify it?...no But could be fun to keep the Telco lobby busy.

I'm sure you posted this just to demonstrate how bad the Government Monopoly Schooling is in America. Right?

Or maybe you were demonstrating how Americans tend to think the whole world revolved around them. Right? Hello???;-) As already mentioned India is the largest, with the European Union being the second largest at 450 million citizens. I'm not sure who's third... is the Russian Federation more populous than the U.S.? I don't kn

Well, we see the bandwidth caps here in Oz, and the transatlantic cables are why there's caps and high costs.

No, the reason that we have high costs is because of the Telstra/ Southern Cross duopoly. Telstra are well known for their high costs (for example the NT pays two to three times as much as the rest of the country only because there is one link. Tasmania has even worse problems). Southern Cross provided much needed capacity when it went in but (AFAICS) doesn't compete on price.

Consider this: When Pipe International announced it was building a new cable (PPC-1) and were selling it at a much lower cost to their customers, Southern Cross massively increased it's capacity and Telstra announced they intend to build new fibre. Pipe have stated that they intend to market their cable at approx 30% less for those who sign up now (IIRC). I can only conclude that we are currently paying far to much to the incumbents. Considering that Telstra and Southern Cross have probably paid for the cost of the infrastructure a high percentage of the money they get now is pure profit. Given the impact that Pipe Networks has had in the peering arrangement between ISP's in Australia I have high hopes that they will have just as much of an impact in international transit.

This already happens. I know of at least one colocation company that has different bandwidth caps for packets to the domestic exchange than packets that have to go abroad. Typically this is because their linkups are supplied by different companies, and the international link costs more.

docsigma2000: jesus christ mandocsigma2000: my son is sooooooo deadc8info: Why?docsigma2000: hes been looking at internet web sites in fucking EUROPEdocsigma2000: HE IS SURFING LONG DISTANCEdocsigma2000: our fucking phone bill is gonna be nutsc8info: Ooh, this is bad. Surfing long distance adds an extra $69.99 to your bill per hour.docsigma2000:...!!!!!! FUCK FUCK FUCKdocsigma2000: is there some plan we can sign up for???docsigma2000: cuz theres some cool stuff in europe, but i dun wanna pauy that muchc8info: Sorry, no. There is no plan. you'll have to live with it.docsigma2000: o well, i ccan live without europe intenet sites.docsigma2000: but till i figure out how to block it hes sooooo deadc8info: By the way, I'm from Europe, your chatting long distance.** docsigma2000 has quit (Connection reset by peer)

and not live under an oppressive government ( or government blessed monopolies )

You got to be kidding! If a business is failing and a government gives it $700bn cash to stay afloat, how is that not a monopoly? I would rather have a government-run ISP than government-run banking and airlines.

A dictionary is a book that has sentences which describe what an individual word is. You can go to a library or bookstore (they have pages of paper with words written on them, which is the form a dictionary tends to come in). Or search the web for information (probably using Google, which is a good example of an actual monopoly).

When the government loans money to a business to keep it afloat, its usually called a "bail out." It has nothing to do with mono

Except that's not what net neutrality is. Net neutrality isn't about charging everyone the same price regardless of how much bandwidth they use, or requiring that everyone has unlimited network capacity. That's silly. It's not even about saying that certain types of traffic can't be prioritized over others -- net neutrality wouldn't prevent ISPs from throttling bit torrent, for example (though there is overlap in the people who support net neutrality and the people who oppose such throttling).

Net neutrality means that Microsoft can't pay your ISP to improve your bandwidth to MSN search while throttling the bandwidth to Google. Net neutrality means that your ISP is not allowed to charge you for bandwidth and then also charge websites to actually connect you to them. (Google is already being charged quite a lot for bandwidth.) Traffic of different types (web vs. bittorrent vs. whatever) can behave differently, but traffic from different sources should be treated the same, to avoid protection-racket style abuses (nice site you got there, it sure would be a shame if my 50 million subscribers were no longer able to reliably access it...)

So, no, net neutrality is not at all about all users paying the same amount regardless of their level of usage. But some of the ISP monopolies have managed to frame it that way by implying that the rules that would apply to destination sites (Yahoo vs. Google) are actually rules about individual subscribers (large versus small bandwidth demand from a single individual). The intent of net neutrality is that ISPs should only be charging for throughput at the network endpoints they control, not at both endpoints of all connections, so we don't end up quadruple-charging for every transmission (as opposed to the current double-charging, which is reasonable since it allows the two parties to the connection to share the cost of the bandwidth they both use).

They are demanding to pay the same $19.95 as their grandma who only checks her email once a day.

Riiiiiight. That's why I pay $60 for a faster network connection, and why just about every ISP that isn't dialup offers "fast" "faster" and "fastest" packages. Smell that? I think your strawman seems to have caught fire.

The fact is, the ISPs have been using this tired "tiered" argument to sideline the real neutrality debate (note how "speed" and "neutrality" aren't synonyms?), as opposed to facing up to having threatened to block competitors' Voice (or TV) over IP offerings rather than competing, or threa

RTFA = what simon says is that because Australia has download caps it's not an issue.

Which is bullshit because net neutrality isn't really about bandwidth congestion; it's about money and control. The big telecoms want the internet to be more like cable television, and a "tiered" internet is their way of implementing it.

No, there is no cartel. What there is is one monopoly (Tel$tra) abusing its power and dictating to ISPs what those ISPs need to pay for access to the Tel$tra network.

To be considered a cartel, there would have to be some kind of deal done between the major players to deliberatly keep prices higher than they should be. The huge number of players in the DSL market means that that cant happen.

If there was a cartel and some kind of secret "lets keep the prices high" agreement, would we really see some of the deals coming from the likes of iiNet, Optus etc?